She replied quietly. “I know all about his offers to buy such things.”

He looked down again. “I contacted the merchant. I told him where I was going. He supplied me with what he thought I would need. Specimen bottles and preservatives. A list of the most desirable parts.” He lifted his chin suddenly and said stubbornly, “I accompanied you on this expedition determined to harvest those parts. With them, I intended to make my fortune, and then to persuade Hest to leave you and come away with me.”

She sat very still, waiting for the rest of it.

“What I accused Leftrin of planning, I actually did. I used you to get close to the dragons. I took scales and blood, even small pieces of flesh from when Thymara cleaned the wound on the copper dragon. I hid them in my room.” As he spoke, he reached into the canvas bag. One at a time, he took out several small glass bottles and set them on the table. One had a tinge of red stain down it. “I intended to take them back to Bingtown, to meet up with the Chalcedean merchant, and make a fortune.”

He stopped there.

After a moment, she realized he was waiting for her. She took up one of the empty bottles and turned it in her hands. “What did you do with them?”

“Greft stole them from me. When he fled with the boat. They’re gone forever, now.” He gestured at the glass vials. She suppressed a shudder and set the one in her hand back on the table with a small clink.

“Why are you telling me this now?”

He paused, then said unwillingly, “Carson. He said I needed to finish old things before I could start something new. This is part of that.”

“You’re finishing with me.”

“No. No, that’s not it at all. I don’t want to lose you, Alise. I know that it’s probably not possible, but somehow I’d like to go back to being the sort of friend I once was to you. Being that person from my side, if you see what I mean, even if you can’t feel about me as you once did. Somehow I went from being your friend to someone who could participate in deceiving you, could even exploit you just to get close to the dragons. I don’t want to be that person anymore. Telling you is a way of destroying him. Telling you about someone like him is something the old Sedric would have done, back when he was really your friend.”

“You mean before Hest got to him. Before Hest got to either of us.” She lifted a hand and rubbed her brow. It gave her a moment to cover her eyes, a brief time of being alone with her own thoughts. It wasn’t really fair to blame it all on Hest. Was it? She and Sedric had gone their own ways before he came along and joined their lives again in such a bizarre fashion. She tried to remember how she had once thought of Sedric. In those years when their lives had taken separate paths, she’d recalled him fondly and smiled over her girlhood infatuation with him. Whenever she chanced to see him, in the market or visiting mutual friends, she’d always felt a leap of pleasure at the sight of him and always greeted him warmly.

His presence, she slowly realized, had been the only pleasant part of her marriage to Hest. She tried to imagine the past few years without him. What if she had been marooned in her marriage to Hest without Sedric’s presence in the house, without his thoughtfulness and conversation at meals? He had, she recalled, been Hest’s adviser in the gifts chosen for her, in her access to the scrolls and books that had made her life tolerable. In some ways, they had been two animals in the same trap. If he had some responsibility for her falling into Hest’s power, he at least had done what he could to ameliorate her misery.

And he had helped to win this journey for her. At what must have seemed a terrible price to him.

It had been a chain of events that led to her finding Leftrin. That led to her finding both love and a life.

With a fingertip, she touched the red-stained bottle. Then she frowned, leaned forward, and picked up the one next to it. It was slightly larger than the others. Something winked at her from inside it. She held it up to the light from the galley window and peered at it. She shook it. It didn’t move, but there was no mistaking what it was.

Then, with a strength that surprised him, she smashed it on the edge of the galley table. Shards of glass went flying, and Sedric instinctively put up his hands to shield his face. “Sorry,” she muttered, shocked at her own impulsiveness. With cautious fingers, she separated the shattered glass until the bottle bottom was revealed. Carefully she plucked out the single small copper-edged scale that had remained stuck inside the bottle. She held it to the light. It was almost transparent.

“A scale,” he said.

“Yes.”